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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer